Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Like A Boss

The title is a quote by Bryce about the gatherer prototype we built. For those who don't know, that quote means "it's awesome."

The beginning of today was spent taking our team picture for the yearbook. Luckily, a lot of the team was there to be in the picture. Most of today was spent doing more brainstorming while we finished the gatherer prototype. The gatherer will be able to pick balls up off the ground and bring them up to some kind of hopper which will then dispense them into our shooter. That's the idea any way... To finish the prototype, we drilled the rest of the holes so we could get the wooden dowels in. We also added a belt to make sure it all worked. There's a video of it up above. The video is also on our YouTube Channel which has a link at the top of this blog.

The brainstorming we were doing while working had a bunch of different tangents.

How do we get our robot over the 4" bump in the middle of the field? Lots of ideas were thrown out: tank treads, some kind of ramp in front of wheels, bigger wheels, more wheels, hovercraft (just kidding).

What kind of shooter to use? Spring catapult, pneumatic catapult, one wheel shooter.

What should the hopper look like? Vertical, ramp, do we need one.

Do we need a gate in front of the gatherer? What should that look like?

While we didn't come up with many answers, just talking through the problems and throwing out ideas is an invaluable experience. Luckily, Bryce's brother-in-law, Jimmy was able to help us out today. Chandler, a student from Alex Tech, also came over to help. It is great to have their expertise available to the team.

Tyler started working on making the schematics for a trial bump and bridge to test our future robot on.

The PR team worked on getting the Echo Press article all set up. They also sent an email to the PMMC (one of our major sponsors, check our sponsors page!) thanking them again for their support and updating them on our progress. The big PR development is that we are going to get our t-shirts ordered. They are going to look so awesome!!! There is a big surprise for the shirts which is going to be amazing. The team is super pumped.

In general, the team is having a little bit of growing pains. There are more students than in the past which is a GREAT thing. It just makes getting organized and keeping everyone on task a little more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. This will come together though. Overall, yet another great day with lots of progress. We already have some good plans for tomorrow. We'll leave you with this picture of Bryce and Bydlon.